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Last week, 3/4’s of the guys from Imagine Dragons came by to chat with Booker, and they couldn’t have been any cooler if they tried. Seriously, these are some of the nicest guys in the biz, and there was a ton of laughter during this interview.

Booker kicked it off the best way possible, chatting with them about their incredible GRAMMYs performance with Kendrick Lamar. This may have been one of our favorite performances from the evening, so we were stoked to hear more about what the collaboration process was like.

There’s no denying that Imagine Dragons has become one of the biggest bands on the planet right now. So we had to know if their main stream success has changed anything. Perhaps it has changed the expectations of things? We needed to know more.

“Maybe, but at the end of the day, the most important thing to us is that we created an album with no expectations, as a small band that was playing empty clubs on the west coast. And it was true for us. We weren’t trying to do anything that wasn’t real for us. It started playing alternative, and then it moved to a very main stream light, and we think that’s cool. We’re not apologetic for that. We created music to play for as many people as we can. I think most artists want to reach out to as many people as they can. I think the most important thing is that it doesn’t change the art that you continue to create. I think our second album will be created with the same intentions. Hopefully we will have matured a little bit as artists, hopefully it will be better. I think it will be different in a lot of ways. But I don’t think it will be affected at all by main stream success. We’re just going to create the best music we can.” – Dan

Booker: So when do you get time to create new music?

“How the creation process works in the band is that either I [Dan] or Wayne will start with a small demo, or Ben and Platzman will have an idea that they will send to me, and I will write lyrics and melody to it or to my own production. We really have 40-50 demos floating around right now, but its all skeletal and beginning, and when we bring it to a live setting and pull it apart and play it live, that’s when it comes to life.”

“The biggest fight we ever has a band is when we have 20 songs, and only 11 can be on the album. But we all came to the realization that our collective consciousness made better decisions than any one member of the band. We generally put stuff up for a vote. When we reach a majority, we go with that decision and we go on. We never go back on it.”

Booker: So where are you at with the the 2nd album then?

It’s hard to say percentage wise where we are at. Using a film term, we’re in pre-production.

We’ll take it! Pre-production for new music works for us, so we switched gears to finding out more about how their music videos come about.

[For Radioactive] “We felt they [the fans] were expecting a post apocalyptic video with Zombies, so we wanted to do something different.”

Booker -It was a litttle traumatic! It made me look at the way I looked a television shows, and I was like ‘man we are so immune to any sort of violence’ and you see these stuffed animals going at it and it was so fierce and I actually walked away feeling like oh man, they’re right!

“We wanted you to feel a little uncomfortable, but you’re like ‘this is so strange. What is this?’ We just wanted to keep everyone on their toes. We like to keep our fans conflicted and confused.”

They left us with a big hand shake, a promise that they are working diligently to get us new music as soon as they can, but luckily for us, the red paint from the GRAMMYs had long washed off.